Is your retention committee broken? Here are seven ideas that may help

Recently we released the 2015 Student Retention and College Completion Practices Benchmark Report. For those of you who contributed to these ratings, thank you. For those thinking about contributing in the future, we are always open to hearing what you think should be asked in the poll. We try to think of everything but understand there are always ideas you have which aren’t included. Send them our way please.

You will see six highlights on page one of the report which describe the information you told us. These highlights include effective practices for student success and retention management, the influence of performance-based funding, graduation rate trends, and, finally, your assessment of your written retention plans.

Why are so many retention plans inadequate?
How you assessed the quality of your current retention plan is what I’d like to talk about today. These findings appear on page seven of the report:

In addition, the quality of the retention committee (not shown here) had similarly low ratings, with just 58.2 percent, 43.6 percent, and 31.2 percent of respondents from the three sectors rating their committee’s quality good or excellent.

What might this really mean? Do these low ratings have something to do with another item which was asked on the poll? Respondents whose institutions had a retention committee were asked to choose the best response from the three options below to describe the committee’s role: (You can see the results on pages 16, 24, and 32.)

The third choice had the highest agreement percentage across all sectors (four-year private, four-year public, and two-year public). The second choice had the next-highest agreement percentage while the first choice had the lowest agreement among respondents across all sectors. It appears that nearly 58 percent of four-year private committees, 49 percent of four-year public committees, and 61 percent of two-year public committees simply meet to share information.

Seven ideas for strengthening your committee
In view of the above findings, here are seven ideas which might help you move more of your committee’s role toward making recommendations rather than just sharing information:

1. The president should appoint the committee and charge them to make recommendations to leadership even when recommendations impact other functions on campus. (Volunteers sometimes do not make good committee members.) The charge should include elements which support the following:

−     Defining the current state
−     Defining the desired state (set goals)
−     Selecting the strategies
−     Developing an action plan for each strategy
−     Developing methods to measure the effectiveness of each strategy
−     Evaluating progress to modify or institutionalize

2. The committee members should include opinion-leaders and innovators—people who will find ways to get the job done. They should be doers, not just policy makers. They must be able to create and aid in the implementation of the plan for the key retention areas.
3. Committee members should be role models (i.e., they have themselves been influenced by sound retention practices).
4. Committee members must be willing to give the time necessary to effect the changes they envision, as the committee work requires a commitment of time—lots of it initially.
5. The committee should be large enough to be representative; however, it should be small enough to function effectively.
6. The committee should represent the campus culture and include a reasonable cross section of the campus: faculty, administration, staff, and possibly students.
7. Membership should include senior management.

I remember when I first formed a retention committee years ago. It was difficult to get movement because we were all trying to be respectful of our organization’s chart boxes. Sometimes we have to agree that for a total student success effort to be fruitful we are going to have to be able to trust each other in the process. This process is more important than the product.  If the process is broken then the product will be too.

What else keeps a committee from being successful and thriving?
I encourage you to add your ideas for making student success and retention committees unique and of very high quality.  Post them in the comments below or send me an email.  While every situation has unique challenges, we can always learn from each other by sharing our ideas and experiences.